Workshop

If you determine that it’s just one person, you’re done with your systemic divide-and-conquer technique
and can now proceed to workstation troubleshooting (which can require a combination of techniques,
including divide and conquer). Otherwise, if it’s more than one person, you need to gather more
information. Is everybody down? Usually not.
I’ve actually seen a situation in which everybody was down due to an electrician accidentally pushing the
emergency off button of an equipment room’s UPS. Here’s one problem that caused a “domino effect” of
a whole bunch of other problems, including no phone service, no network services, and general chaos.
This is pretty unusual, and it’s the exception rather than the rule.
As network infrastructures are becoming as important as the telephone system, people are starting to get
very paranoid about putting all their eggs in one basket. Many servers now have extra (redundant) faulttolerant
power supplies so that if one power supply breaks, the server stays up. Because servers are
usually connected to a UPS (uninterruptible power supply or battery backup unit), it’s desirable to put
each server power supply on a different UPS; otherwise, one broken UPS could take down the server.
This might be expensive, but so is downtime. Whether your company has redundant power really depends
on whether your management is committed to spending the money to get as much reliability and fault
tolerance as possible.
Once you determine which functional group is not working properly, it’s time to haul out those maps you
so diligently drew after you mastered Hour 2, “You Can’t Have Too Much Documentation!” People will
tell you that they can’t log into the server, that their drive letters are gone, or even that all the PCs in their
area have locked up. You’ll have to find out from those who call in whether it’s “just them” or if it
affects everybody. You’ll also want to find out which department they’re in. Alternatively, you can take
a look for yourself: If all the PCs were able to connect to the network a few days ago but now they can’t,
then for all intents and purposes, these PCs are “down,” regardless of whether it’s an Ethernet problem or
a problem with a switch or server.
Previous Table of Contents Next